Restless

Introduction to the book. How good do people feel in the Low Countries, still after all a prosperous delta area? Comfortably discontented, as one poet writes? How do they cope with the way of all flesh known as ‘ageing', with the welfare-and-happiness supermarket and with their lunatics? And were they unhappy, or just restless and bent on profit, four hundred years ago when they and their ships sailed the seven seas?